Hyung Nam Kim
North Carolina A & T State University, NC·Engineering
Good design starts with understanding people, yet designers often focus on collecting objective data rather than connecting emotionally with the users they design for. Design Thinking is a problem-solving method in which designers study a challenge, brainstorm solutions, and refine them through prototyping and testing, often while meeting users face to face.
- Fields
Engineering
Psychology
Education Research
- Topics
Design Thinking
emotional intelligence
empathy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Advance understanding of human emotion systems as they relate to the emotional interaction between designers and users in Design Thinking.
- Uncover individual differences in emotional intelligence, the ability to perceive, understand and manage one's own emotions, among designers.
- Create an initiative to enhance designers' emotional intelligence that accounts for individual differences, to foster empathy toward users with disabilities.
- Evaluate how the emotional intelligence initiative affects designers' emotional interaction with users during in-person Design Thinking activities.
More about the research
This project asks whether strengthening designers' emotional intelligence can improve those meetings. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand and manage one's own emotions. The goal is designs that meet more people's needs, including the distinct needs of users with disabilities.
Why it matters
Helping designers connect emotionally with users could lead to products and services that better meet the needs of people with disabilities and other users whose needs are often overlooked. A training program tailored to individual differences in emotional intelligence could be used in design education and practice.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Hamid Nadir
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC·Education Research
Identify challenges and opportunities in current elementary curricula and co-design a combined Biology and Computer Science (Bio+CS) curriculum with local teachers and students.
Nicholas A Giudice
University of Maine, ME·Computer Science
Develop user-centered design guidelines that specify which information and sensory pairings, such as speech, sound or touch, best support the most common navigation tasks across a whole trip for blind and visually impaired travelers.
Hae-Na Lee
Michigan State University, MI·Computer Science
Develop detection algorithms that analyze webpage layouts, interaction workflows, user actions, and accessible navigation paths to identify deceptive design patterns, including ones created by mismatches between a page's visual structure and its screen reader reading order.
The school
North Carolina A & T State University: 5 labs on PI Pages, $82M a year on research, 72 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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